The journalist who popularized the "-gate" suffix regards "doublebillingsgate" as his greatest creation.

Accumulated an unprecedented amount of power. That's what this story is about.

It's not necessary to actually do anything else. Mussolini didn't really make the trains run on time. He took credit for some reforms his predecessor implemented (sound familiar?). Hitler didn't actually make the streets safe, he just called off his own goons who were purposely stirring things up.

The key to being a populist strongman is making people believe you're going to solve problems that need to be solved by any means necessary. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. You just have to keep things going long enough for the "any means" to take effect.

it wasn't applied to other scandals until the Clinton administration when he was involved in the Whitewater scandal.

Well, give or take a couple dozen -gates.

And by "Clinton administration when he was involved in the Whitewater scandal" I guess you mean Bill Clinton's state governorship in the early 80s, when Whitewater corp was active? Because the actual scandal broke when he was a presidential candidate in 1992, not president.

Being ignorant of history in general is one thing. Being ignorant of your own history, especially relatively recent history, especially when you're from as supposedly patriotic a country as the US is another.

If the TV was appropriately cheaper for not having the smarts, the $30 might not seem like much. It's not exactly complicated to plug the chromecast into an HDMI input. The chromecast remote will be what you need most of the time since the chromecast itself can turn the TV on, select the correct input, etc and the remote also has an IR transmitter to handle the volume function.

Admittedly, assembling the Pi is a step up in knowledge many wouldn't manage.

Many people do manage to use a chromecast just fine.

It would be better to somehow ban enshittification, but even defining it legally would be a hard problem, much less getting the legislation past the gauntlet of industry lobbyists.

Can they actually be fabricated with known manufacturing processes?

Probably. The feature sizes for visible light tend to be in the range of the same lithography we use to make chips. See their references 3-5 for examples, including actual manufacturing.

I would like it better if they had actually fabricated some of these lenses and provided test data.

This is not how science works best. There are scientists who like to collect work over years or decades, turn it into a complete "story" and publish an uber paper at the end. That approach hurts all the people who work on the project except for the lucky ones who put on the finishing touches, and it's bad for the field in general, wasting time and money. Frequent publication is good for science.

Lucas was just echoing history. Julius Caesar accumulated ridiculous amounts of power because he got stuff done then, when he got killed for it, his heir got to be emperor, in a society that famously hated kings, because he ended the chaos.

Hitler got himself appointed dictator because he cracked down on street violence... created by his followers.

Mussolini (said he) made the trains run on time.

Legally, no. The US constitution itself limits the president's term, and an 1845 law sets the actual election date.

However, you might have trouble voting if, say, there were some guys with guns in your city that were skeptical of your need to be walking around. Lots of states have quite a bit of experience with that method.

Or if you're in prison (except in Maine and Vermont), or on parole or probation in about half the states. Or if you've EVER been convicted of a felony if you're in Florida, Iowa, Kentucky or Virginia.

Or, since only about half the states actually require their electors to vote according to the popular vote, you could just, you know, encourage them to vote a particular way.

There's the ever popular armed-marine-at-the-ballot-box method too. The US has some experience with that.

Lots of options!

That is in fact the way it used to work. US presidents were sort of nobodies. The chief civil servant, if you will. The powerful, famous president started to be more of a thing after WWII.

If it makes you feel better, studies of the US courts, and the supreme court in particular, generally find that it's much less partisan than you might expect. Joe Blow, the media and politicians really need to stop talking about it in partisan terms though, including the nomination and confirmation processes.

Looking forward to seeing the Federal Reserve fired every four years. That should provide the stability needed to arrest the "world's reserve currency" from it's fall from 100% to ~50% of actual world reserves.

Yes, the -gate habit comes from the Watergate scandal. Watergate was during Richard Nixon's second term as president, in 1972-4. He was a Republican, and resigned the presidency before he could be impeached. The name comes from an attempted break in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington DC that ended up uncovering a whole pile of shady stuff Nixon had been up to.

Are Americans actually this ignorant of their own history?

Sooner or later, we'll run out of consultants. People eventually retire or quit the industry in disgust and the new crop of vibe coders certainly aren't going to fill those roles.

That matches my (limited) experience. Just for giggles, I let copilot (on Github) have a crack at a function in some of my code. Its suggested improvement made some sense in a vacuum, but in context it read more like someone who feels they must 'contribute' something and that's all they could find. It didn't seem to understand that the function would always be called in the context of a transaction and raising an exception will roll it back.

There is a difference. If you learned Pascal as the wave of the future, you could always do FORTRAN or with a little re-training, C (pointers always left Pascal programmers a bit befuddled at first). If you bet on Java, you could always migrate to C or Python. Some of the IDEs do leave people a bit brain dead, but not so much they can't make the jump to a simple text editor and command line compiler. Even BASIC was OK though you'd have to un-learn a few bad habits.

But if you learn 'vibe coding', you are dead in the water without the AI. No amount of typing "Make a game like Wolfenstein 3D but in a shopping mall with perfume ladies that take half of your health points.." into the compiler will get you anywhere at all.

Jokes on them... my profile has all dummy stuff on it so I can look people up on LinkedIn for where they are working HAHA